To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

We are going around the table on new year's eve, rating our past year on a scale of 1 to 10. The guests: artists, fashion designers, jewelers, and one or two people with real jobs sprinkled in for diversity. Two immaculately groomed poodles run around and entertain the visitors. Before us, an exactingly curated procession of morsels: blini with salmon and caviar, black brioche with cured egg yolk and parmigiano foam, ravioli with pumpkin and cod with browned butter and crispy sage. The apartment, naturally, is luxurious without being gauche (that would be unforgivable) every piece selected with impeccable taste and just the right amount of personal touch. And so we rate our years, the numbers start coming out, and it is a parade of 2s and 3s, each delivered with a sort of practiced weltschmerz. One of the guests plans to commit suicide soon. The only 10 in the room: me. Is it because I've been perfectly happy, carefree? No—not quite.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, about my relationship with suffering. All this pain in the past few months, I think most people would recoil from it. Instead, I'm drawn towards it. Is it psychological masochism? The intensity of emotion—it makes me feel alive, present, it gives me a heightened awareness of everything, inside and out.

I compulsively play with the pain in my mind: my thoughts trace its edges like fingers mapping an unknown shape in the dark; I run my mind over its surface to feel its texture, sometimes sharpcutting, sometimes soft and dull; I press against it, and see how it reacts; I savor it, let it melt in my mouth and glory in its bitterness; I feel the heat radiating from it like the dying embers of a fire late at night, and other times like x-rays blasting out of a black hole; I spin it around examining it from each and every angle one by one, appreciating its style from every point of view; I push it far away and look at it with a telescope to admire its entire structure, and then bring it right up to me and inspect every microscopic little element on its surface, and then sometimes I dive in and give myself over to it and let it envelop me and permeate my whole being until I feel and perceive nothing else and time stops completely.

(And sometimes I will take a good look at myself as though I were a case study: "Subject displays strong tendencies toward self-dramatization, perpetually overthinking and rationalizing their emotions through baroque metaphors.")

I am even amused and entertained by it. I laugh at my life and these surprising and delightful and wretchedly dark alleyways it's leading me down. A dull psychiatrist would say it's nothing more than a defense mechanism. I don't believe that at all. This is not about protecting myself or "processing". It's "saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems"—not to be liberated from terror and pity, but "in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming". There is a kind of distance there, but it's not a detachment, it is rather a doubling of perception. It's a way of transmuting things. It's not that the pain becomes less real or less painful—it becomes more real, more vibrant, more itself—but it also becomes something else simultaneously.

To treat reality as a medium, to live life with the texture of a novel—this is part of the bargain of being me: simultaneously the author and his character. The paradox: rather than dulling your emotions, this splitting of consciousness instead makes everything more vivid. Like adding a mirror to a mirror and creating—infinity. When you view yourself from the third person, as someone whose life you are sketching out, every powerful emotion is a delight. And it's not just pain that works this way—joy, too, takes on this double character, I'm swept up in it while also watching myself being swept up, and somehow the watching makes the feeling more intense rather than less. I am both the alchemist and his quicksilver, the sculptor and the clay, creature and creator.

I love my life — aesthetically.

It's not a mechanical collecting of experiences to dissect on a couch or on the page. Baudelaire writes of the artist-dandy as "a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge of life is blunted." Not "making meaning" after the fact, but in the experience of every moment. A perpetual state of creative tension, of becoming and self-overcoming.

That is―Anti-Buddhism. Self-examination not to feel less, but to feel more. Not to avoid suffering, but to glory in life. Not to detach but to overcome. Not to escape, but to revel in life! Not to transcend, but to heighten. Cultivating not detachment, but intensity and sensitivity, with a poet's intentionality, making the self into an artist in the joy of its own eternal becoming. Creating a layer of aesthetic appreciation that runs parallel to the raw experience, and shapes it. Saying No! to the inhuman, life-denying ascetic nihilism of seeking "liberation" from attachment and suffering, No! to the naiveties about pleasure and pain that constitute this intellectual morass that surrounds us.

Everywhere people seek to smooth life's edges. Instead of riding its violent waves, they seek to transform them into a tepid swimming pool suitable for gentle laps without the least chance of drowning. They cling desperately onto old religions when they talk about enlightenment but mean only quietude, when they preach transcendence but mean only escape. What petty bargains with existence! This is not wisdom, but cowardice masquerading as enlightenment. They seek to tame, diminish, and bridle everything that should be wild! What is this if not a rejection of life itself? Life, which knows nothing of balance but only of tension, nothing of peace but only of creative strife! What sickness entices you to paddle in the shallows instead of making infinite demands on life and always finding yourself in some new wilderness? For "life consists with wildness, and the most alive is the wildest."

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it – has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

I used to view the tortured artist with both envy and skepticism. It was a Romantic idea that I thought I wanted, while at the same time dismissing it as an affectation, a trope, a false source of inspiration, or perhaps just a tool to seduce women with. Sour grapes, I suppose. Now I have become him (inadvertently? or by design?) and the view from the inside is not quite what I was expecting...it is both more silly and more real than I thought it'd be. There is certainly an absurd theater to it all. But the authenticity lies precisely in embracing the sublime and the ridiculous, in realizing that the real thing is both more serious and more playful than the cliché suggests. But it's not about turning pain into art, it's this splitting of consciousness that makes the darkest moments shimmer with beauty. Pain is not raw material to be processed later—it's already art in the moment of perception, if you've developed the right kind of vision. "Art from pain" is shallow, I am talking about a methodology of life and consciousness: Amor fati!

The great sickness of our age: the belief that life is something to be managed rather than a drama to be enacted.

Anyway, this is all a bit melodramatic if not pretentious...

 

—A wonderful piece.